KIRKUS REVIEW

When Jillette (Every Day Is an Atheist
Holiday!: More Magical Tales from the Author of God, No!, 2012, etc.) was told by his
doctor that he would need stomach sleeve surgery in six months in order to lose
100 pounds (at 320 pounds, his systolic blood pressure was a frightening 220),
he took this warning as permission to "go crazy." To avoid
surgery, he sought out his friend Ray Cronise, an entrepreneur and former NASA
scientist nicknamed “CrayRay,” shortened from "Crazy Ray,” who put him on
a 90-day “hard-core cold and hungry diet.” Jillette provides a day-to-day account
of his near-starvation diet—nothing but potatoes for the first two weeks!—and
risky weight loss. Readers should not expect a well-researched argument
against the unhealthy and potentially deadly American diet; the book is mostly filthy,
self-deprecating humor from a self-described “idiot” and “fat fuck.” Jillette
was a competitor on Donald Trump's Celebrity
Apprentice, and his description of Trump's peculiar, ridiculous coiffure is
one of his funnier lines: “hair that looks like cotton candy made of piss.” As
in Penn & Teller's stage act, the author is garrulous, rude, refreshingly
honest, and sometimes overbearing. There isn't much drama once he reaches his
goal weight—he lost an astonishing 74.5 pounds in only 83 days, which was 24.4
percent of his body weight. What follows are mostly tales of what he ordered in
restaurants and ate at parties. In the end, Jillette learned that rather
than futilely trying to "catch the vibe of the foods he used to love….it's
better to just create new comfort foods."

A sometimes-funny book that should
be taken with a tablespoon of salt.

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